This disclosure relates generally to patient health monitoring and more specifically to increasing bandwidth and throughput in a wireless body area network used for patient health monitoring.
A wireless body area network (WBAN) includes wearable computing devices which are often used to monitor a patient's vital signs (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, electrocardiogram (ECG) data, etc.) in a hospital's telemetry ward. A wireless personal area network (WPAN) is a short-range network covering a range of about forty feet. The WPAN can be used as a gateway by the WBAN to reach telemetry stations and/or repeaters, so that the monitors can communicate their information to a centralized location.
Because of the critical nature of the information being transmitted by a patient's WBAN, the data outage specifications can require a transmission success rate of, for example, about 95%. Vital sign monitoring is an important part of patient care since the general or particular health of the patient is determined, in part, through measurement and interpretation of key physiological indicators. Such physiological data, however, is only of use if it is transmitted in a timely and accurate manner. Transmission of such vital sign data must therefore be timely and be transmitted at a high rate of success for a WBAN to be beneficial to patient monitoring. Wireless medium in general does not guarantee the reliable data transmission.